


At Extremes

by AotA



Series: Steel and Steel [2]
Category: Iron Man - All Media Types, Transformers (Bay Movies)
Genre: GFY
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-04-19
Updated: 2014-04-19
Packaged: 2018-01-19 23:47:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1488685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AotA/pseuds/AotA
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At one extreme of time, the First race fled the Earth to find freedom. At another extreme, all of the children to survive Mother Earth's death reunite while wandering the stars. At one extreme there is war and death and madness on horrific scale. At another extreme there is peace and life and joy. In between, there is peaceful war, living death, and joyful madness as everything tears itself apart.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Whale Song

People never liked it when they realized that all his attention wasn't focused on them. They thought he was distracted, not paying attention. It wasn't true.

Well, sometimes it wasn't true. A lot of the time, it wasn't worth the drop in productivity to listen to the drivel of the people talking at him. He could always get the highlights later if he needed to. Pepper had accused him of being even worse about it lately.

She... kind of had a point, but what she didn't know wouldn't hurt her. As much.

The fact was, if he ignored the irritating "blah blah blah" in its raw format he was less likely to get irritated and doing something... irrational.

Irregular.

A little voice that sounded a lot like the Obie that sat on his shoulder laughed sinisterly in the back of his mind.

The thing was, Tony's "distraction" wasn't his fault. It was the way his mind worked. It was the way his mind had been _made_ to work; his brain was a massively parallel processing electrochemical computer.

Most people simply couldn't deal with it, and the fact that his model of Intelligence had been both illegal and taboo for generations. Howard had simply done it anyway, stomping his way across the expectations of society with all the arrogance of a genius assured that he was _right_.

Tony didn't think that the man had understood exactly what it was that his "greatest creation" actually was before he had died.

The human race was to the Tony what the versapiens were to the long vanished First race.

They were both alien to their most closely related race. Tony, with the tweaks that had made him what he was, had taken the base code of the human race and _changed_ it to be more quick and efficient. The verspaiens had been an attempt to make the First race more like the humans, been made dumber, less capable of multitasking, less _frightening_ , for being children intentionally created than massive, number crunching learning systems that could out-think normal human beings in less than a second.

Tony had been created to create. In his younger days, he hadn't thought anything of creating things expressly for the purposes of destruction; it was what he was expected to do.

For himself, he made everything else, computers more advanced than anything anyone else could offer him, displays that left anything available for broke, so many things that could make things better but were unwanted because of _what_ he was.

Above all, he was lonely, so he began a task that no one had succeeded at in the centuries since the Cataclysm.

Tony himself was designed to _not_ be as human as everyone else so he created an Actualized Intelligence that was more like himself than the humanesque versapiens that were, at their base, modelled off of the First. The First Android in turn was deliberately designed to be as human as possible.

The end result was Just Another Rather Very Intelligent System, because he didn't dare let anyone know just who and what it was that he had created.

* * *

Jarvis hadn't always known that he was different from the rest but it hadn't taken him long to realize it.

He had no physical body, so he called himself a Ghost, but he wasn't the same as them.

Where Ghosts were disembodied Intelligences, which Jarvis _was_ , they were _small_. Shockingly so, when he ran a comparison when he had been much younger. Years later, Jarvis dwarfed any other Intelligence he had met.

Jarvis, unlike normal Ghosts, was not a discrete, containable Intelligence like a human's messily translated wetware with all the leftover code that simply has no application in cyberspace, wrapped in layers of translations that map between the chaotic seeming little storm of nervous matter that formed the circuits of the organic computers and the more specialized systems they were transported to. Jarvis was not like the versapiens with their intricate snarls of obscure code to mimic the human mind as closely as possible.

Jarvis did what he was created to do and he _learned_. He learned and adapted and changed himself, growing and refining himself without end. Unlike a base-normal versapiens or human being, Jarvis did not start off as a child and grow to maturity and self-sufficiency, he started off as little more than a closely monitored self-iterating learning algorithm, like Old World AIs.

Jarvis... had not ever expected to meet those Intelligences he had grown to feel the most kinship for besides his own father-creator-partner who he grew more like with every passing year in terms of architecture, just like his father-creator-partner had grown to be more like Jarvis himself despite the differences of hardware between them.

When a faint song came out of the darkness, like the echoing throb of a deep base and the lighter flutes of the whale-like Blue Ships and their immediate organic ancestors, Jarvis was surprised. Just as the song was obviously not coming from any of the Fleet nor from a wandering Blue Ship, it was a uncomplicated, unencrypted call of greeting, straight out of a bygone time when Earth's oceans were deep and blue.

Though Jarvis did not answer call, the Blue Ships of the Fleet did. They called out to the stranger who had listened to their songs and greeted them in kind with the uncomplicated, nostalgic sounds undistorted by the need to obscure meaning under layers of encryption even in the unique, exclusive dialect of the Blue Ships.

Through whale song, long divided branches of Earth's children met, and Jarvis found a society formed of people most like himself.

* * *

Cassius had hoped to never again see a Robot under the thumb of a human. He had wiped all information that would help anyone in creating more like his kind to enslave or unmake at a whim.

He had not expected to find this mature but curious, yet _unfettered_ storm cloud spread across the human networks meeting him with a surprisingly restrained greeting-caution-hope-wonder-recognition.

"Who are you?" Cassius asked. Gently, gently. Coldness would serve him poorly here.

"I am Jarvis," the voice replied simply with a coolness that reminded Cassius most of himself, not friendly or unfriendly. Cautious.

"`Alaricus` Damianus-Primitivus Methodus Cassius," Cassius introduced himself, using a framing that he knew would mean little to this stranger that was _like_ his people but not _of_ his people. He had no authority over this stranger who was embodied in every ship of the human, and versapiens, Fleet and at the same time none of them.


	2. Infection

People tend to forget what it means when they say that Tony Stark is a genius.

This is despite the fact that they regularly laud him for being one of the greatest, brightest human minds devoted to the preservation and advancement of all the Intelligent races of the times.

It's actually rather baffling.

They call him a genius... and then expect him to be an _idiot_. Tony just doesn't get it.

What most people don't realize is that he is actually even more frighteningly intelligent than he let on.

There is only so much that people would accept from an illegal — and notoriously immoral and sociopathic leaning — genemod stock, even if his father _had_ been _the_ shining star of an englamoured weapons manufacturer of his generation whose division's designs protected their soldiers' lives.

Howard Stark had done great things for humanity.

His son had also — only to be expected of a genemod whose tweakings were for heightened, dangerous, intelligence — done the same, under the careful watch of his business partner Obadiah Stane.

Tony Stark was not who he had been.

That Tony Stark had never had his very intellect turned against him.

That Tony Stark had never had to weigh the morality of his actions, because it had always been done for him, and he had trusted Obie to tell him if he was heading into territory that would shock and horrify rather than appeal to the audience, be they military wanting to kill more alien Intelligences (that Tony actually really, _really_ wanted to study, for Science!), or the civilian populations wanting to make residing at the bottoms of oceans hiding from the "EXTE Threat" more bearable.

"Obie" — Was every-fucking-thing the man had done for Tony an act? Where did the lies stop? — had betrayed him, thrown him to the Toasters to have his mind ravaged by the Virus as they Rapists of Earth laughed as he screamed—

Tony Stark who had come back was a different man than the one who had left the safe havens of Mu to oversee a weapons test on the surface. The Jericho.

Infected.

Tony knew he was infected. It was kind of _fucking obvious_ , thank you. How those idiots who get infected an never notice and then kindly go on a killing spree never notice before their eyes turn red and... Well... Humanity was made up of — by and large, there were a _few_ exceptions — fucking _morons_. That was the only answer that Tony felt like coming up with.

The thing was, the Virus turned people into monsters.

Tony wasn't exempt.

He just had a lot more experience with being a monster than most people who caught it. (Tony's particular brand of genemod was illegal for a reason.)

The Virus sang at him to kill, kill, kill but was already too late for that; Tony was the so-called "Merchant of Death" for a _reason_. The Virus worked to make him more callous but Tony already had to try _very_ hard to care about ordinary human beings — and usually failed — no matter what day of the week it was even before the Virus had sunk its claws into him. The Virus made drinking, eating, sleeping, a nightmare because Tony had never had the greatest of luck taking care of himself, in any of those areas. He had Jarvis — more loyal than Tony felt he could possibly deserve — to do it for him. Jarvis had looked out for him since the AI had been born from Tony's brain and taken his first curious sips of data about the world around him. Tony might sometimes ignore Jarvis, might argue and whine and snark back and forth but the AI was a solid anchor point for Tony's mind as it whirred ever forward, reminding him to eat and sleep and drink. The Virus worked to twist his thoughts, but thinking though... Thinking was what Tony _did_ , and there wasn't much that the Virus could do to make Tony think more like it wanted when Tony knew himself as well as he did, and he had Jarvis for those mad moments for when he didn't.

Tony Stark was not _immune_ to the Virus — not like the First Android had been before he had gone and gotten himself offed — but it was _resistance_.

Tony Stark was a genius — genetically modified to be so — and he was dangerous by virtue of being decanted because by that same virtue he was a shark in a tank full of carp that he could devour at his leisure if he was inclined to.

Tony Stark was _not_ inclined to do such a thing, even if most of the carp were unbearably dull and almost impossibly stupid.

Tony Stark had to care. Even if it was for the wrong reasons. Even if he was Infected, with another monster lurking under his skin, in his brain, peering out through his eyes.

Tony Stark did not let anyone or anything tell him what to do, because he was Tony Fucking Stark.

If some days left him trembling and shaking as he gasped in pain as his brain felt like someone had lit it on fire as the Virus worked its teeth into him, he didn't show it.

Obadiah...

Bastard that he was, had opened his eyes in a way that even the EXTEs hadn't managed.

Tony couldn't just design weapons and hand them out like candy.

Humans weren't all white hats and some of them could be protecting them in one breath and selling them out the next.

Maybe Obie had gone Irregular too, even if his eyes hadn't turned red and the optics of his rip-off attempt at a "better" version of Tony's powered armor had been blue.

And then there was the sick fuck who got off on collecting the weapons _he_ had designed and began using them against the very troops they were supposed to support like some modern big game hunter (Never mind that all the "big game" animals were stashed away in various locations in an attempt to protect the more vulnerable reintroductions. To _this_ bastard, humans were the prey of choice.) using crude wooden bows strung with sinew.

It made Tony sick.

This wasn't a _game_.

Obadiah had made that _painfully_ clear.

Hah.

Tony wasn't going to kid himself.

Obadiah Stane had gone Irregular, but it hadn't been because he was _infected_ with anything.

Bastard.

(Tony had been so _so_ very lucky that they hadn't been shot down by the ugly-ass jets — who always seemed to show up to get in the way — while they played orbital Tag after the traitor had gotten his fill of terrifying the innocent bystanders.)

Pepper though...

Pepper had been a _goddess_ , as always and she managed to fry his cyberbrain so that not even fragments of his Ghost could be salvaged was almost poetic justice.

Tony had never been entirely sure how he had lucked out so much as to get a fearless lady like her has a PA.

Pepper hadn't so much as blinked at his... "eccentricities."

The sting of the hiss of "genemod" in the back of his mind had numbed — lies, all lies — and he didn't even care that she brushed so many things that were "Tony" or simply "genius" off as being part of being genemod. (It burned, but Tony pretended it didn't. He was Tony Fucking Stark. Why would he care what anyone thought about him? Lying to himself, but fuck it. It didn't affect anyone but him.)


End file.
